


Some Other Beginning

by anotherFMAfan



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Community: fma_fic_contest, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-17 00:48:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10582953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anotherFMAfan/pseuds/anotherFMAfan
Summary: "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end."Shamballa AU (certain elements of the latter half of Shamballa do not apply). No pairings. Ed and Al, Mustang and crew.Language. Tons o’ fluff with just a hint of angst.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written last year for the very final prompt at the wonderful LJ community FMA_Fic_Contest. It was an honor to be a part of this comm. My thanks to everyone who was involved over the years!

Edward Elric kicked the bottom of the office door of General Roy Mustang with his automail foot, and heard Captain Hawkeye give a long-suffering sigh from behind him. He turned to flash her an apologetic smile before opening the door and presenting himself in the doorway, hands on hips.  
  
The general had his pen lifted mid-sentence over the page, and was looking at Ed with a distinctly unamused expression.  
  
Edward grinned, and gave a shrug.  
  
“Old times’ sake.”  
  
Mustang pointedly returned his pen to the page without comment, but said to Jean, “Lieutenant, if you would.”  
  
“Yessir,” Havoc replied, and addressed Ed as he began to pull documents out of files. “Hey, boss.” His greetings were echoed by Breda and Fuery, and Ed returned them.  
  
“Helping out with the family business, is it?” Jean asked as he shuffled papers.  
  
“Something like that, yeah. This guy I helped out of a pinch a while ago took a shining to it,” he said, wiggling the fingers of his right hand. “Of course. Won’t find better Automail anywhere. Turns out he was a diplomat or somethin’. Had a big order from abroad come in. Going to keep things pretty busy through the end of September. Al and I’ll be pitching in for three months, four, maybe.”  
  
“That’s great,” said Fuery with a smile.  
  
“The researchers aren’t going to like it,” said Roy, returning his pen to its rest and folding his hands over the desk. “They’ve gotten to keep you all to themselves these last few months.”  
  
Ed scoffed loudly, making his antenna flutter. “By courier is good enough for the likes of them.”  
  
“The courier’s not going to like it, either,” he pointed out dryly, but Ed ignored him, taking the papers Havoc offered him across the desk and sitting down at the table to sign them.  
  
“You really coming back?” asked the lieutenant. “After you get nice and used to that country air, living with all other hicks again.…”  
  
“Aw, shut up,” he replied, but after a small pause answered. “We’ll see. We’ll see how Al feels about it.”  
  
“The researchers really wouldn’t forgive me then,” Mustang complained.  
  
“If they miss me that much they can haul their own asses out there t’see me. Make their sorry behinds sit on the train for days straight,” Ed grumbled, standing to hand the finished papers back to Havoc.  
  
“I don’t know,” Breda drawled. “I think if Harrison came into contact with that much sunlight at once it might kill him.” Seeming satisfied with the round of snickers this incited at the notoriously reclusive alchemist’s expense, Breda came over to where Ed was standing, and Havoc followed suit.  
  
“Take care on the way, eh?” Breda said, giving him a few solid back-thumps for good measure.  
  
“See you, boss!” Havoc said, raising a hand, and the two moved toward the door and other duties.  
  
“Bye!”  
  
“All I can say is you’d better be good for it, Fullmetal,” Mustang warned him. “You and the courier.”  
  
“Calm down, bastard, would ya?” Ed grinned, turning around to face him after waving the lieutenants goodbye. “You’re going to give yourself a hernia tryin’a squeeze me that hard.”  
  
Roy gave a snort, then stood.  
  
“Well, then. In case you do decide to remain out there with the cows,” he said, and came around the desk to face the Fullmetal Alchemist squarely.  
  
The general extended his hand, and Edward shook it.  
  
“Thanks for everything, General. Goodbye.”  
  
Roy smiled, the eye not hidden by the eyepatch fond, such a different expression from the last time the two had bidden each other farewell.  
  
“Of course. Goodbye, Ed.”  
  
Ed smiled back and, with a mock salute, turned to go.  
  
After stopping to say goodbye to Fuery and Hawkeye, Edward walked down the steps and out the front entrance of the building. Foregoing the grand walk that led down to the main gate for the small walkway along the side, he headed across the grounds.  
  
When he reached the edge, the guards swung wide the gate for him, returning to attention to salute him as he passed through.  
  
“Take it easy,” Ed said with a wave, and headed toward the black car stopped at the curb, where his brother stood leaning against the side, waiting.  
  
“Let’s put the top down,” Edward said, patting the roof of the car with a thunk of metal-on-metal.  
  
“You’re saying that like that top is designed to go down,” said Alphonse. “Let’s FORCIBLY REMOVE the top is what you mean—”  
  
“I’ll put it back,” Edward assured, eying the car and making some mental calculations, while doing so marveling at how much, in the last few months, his brother’s personality had come to resemble the way it had been before he had lost his memory.  
  
“This is a RENTED car, brother, I do hope—”  
  
The car was enveloped in crackles of blue light, and Alphonse let out a long sigh. What was done, was done, and the brothers climbed into their seats of the now-open-topped car and closed the doors without further discussion.  
  
“So everything is finished up at headquarters?” Al asked as he started the engine. By birth certificate Al was old enough to hold a license, and thus most often sat in the driver’s seat; after all, his driving was infinitely safer than Ed’s.  
  
“Yeah, submitted the paperwork, had the chance to see everybody, say goodbye. We’re all set.”  
  
That confirmed, Al put the car in gear and pulled away, in the direction of the station.  
  
“Even if it turns out to be only a season, it must be hard on you,” he said. “Saying goodbye to people you’ve known so long, after you only just got back to see them not half a year ago.”  
  
Ed shook his head. “I got to say goodbye. That’s just fine.”  
  
Al gave a curious frown. “Because ‘goodbye’ doesn’t mean goodbye, but ‘until we meet again?’”  
  
“No,” Ed said, frankly. “Goodbye doesn’t mean anything like that. Mustang, Havoc, Hawkeye and those guys, they’re soldiers. You never know when any of them could be killed in the line of duty. Happens all the time.”  
  
“Brother!”  
  
“It’s true, I mean, hell, it’s not like even civilians don’t have that risk. Traffic accidents, natural causes, a shit-ton people died from the _flu_ last year, but fuck’s sake.”  
  
“‘A shit-ton?’” Al repeated flatly.  
  
“Yeah, it was in some report Falman had on his desk a while ago.”  
  
“Brother,” Al said, his voice getting tight in disapproval in that Al way of his. “Surely you didn’t just TAKE that off his desk—”  
  
“Anyway,” Ed said, waving away Al’s objections to return to the point at hand. “You may never meet again.”  
  
“Then, what, it means ‘I might never see you again?!’ That’s awful!”  
  
“No, it doesn’t mean that, either, you might see them again a hundred times. Nobody knows what could happen. Nobody knows if what’s here today will be here tomorrow. It’s not about what might happen from here on out. It’s about what has happened up until that moment.”  
  
Al was quiet a moment, seeming to absorb that.  
  
“All right,” he said. “If not that, then what?”  
  
Ed gave a sigh and a shrug, struggling to find the words.  
  
“It’s…life’s…a bitch. It’s cruel, it’s unfair, it’s painful.” He was quiet for some time, but then continued. “You know, I used to think ‘goodbye’ meant ‘I’m sorry,’” he said at last, looking off at the passing streets unseeingly, mind far away. “’I’m sorry I can’t keep you with me.’”  
  
 _The eyes that shone from that sunken, skull-like face that inevitably came to Edward’s mind every time he pulled up the memory of her kind smile._  
  
“’I’m sorry I can’t stay.’”  
  
 _Only once had he looked back down the road on that day in October, careful not to be caught by Al, to see those two small figures side-by-side, so small and so far, about to be infinitely farther._  
  
“’I’m sorry I can’t go with you.’”  
  
 _The sunset staining the buildings shades of red, how grave had been his voice, his eyes when he uttered that one word, there at the sudden split of their paths, which had for long unknowingly had the same goal._  
  
“But when I was…” he gave a vague wave above him. “Over there…. That was the first time…”  
  
 _His blue eyes, that bright blue that looked right into him, the feel of his hand as he squeezed his, and made his final request._  
  
“The first time I said goodbye and knew what it really meant. That I finally realized that goodbye doesn’t mean ‘I’m sorry.’ It really means ‘thank you.’"  
  
“’Thank you?’” Alphonse pressed gently.  
  
“Yeah.” Ed smiled a bit, smile wistful. “Life’s a bitch: it’s cruel, it’s unfair, it’s painful, and somewhere in the middle of all that you were together. ‘Thank you for understanding.’ ‘Thank you for letting me go.’ ‘Thank you for believing in me.’ ‘Thank you for having been at my side.’ ‘Thank you for what you’ve done.’ ‘Thank you for making me who I am now, at this moment. Thank you.’”  
  
Al smiled as he pulled the car up to a stoplight, and turned to look at his brother.  
  
“It might not make sense, but,” Ed shrugged.  
  
“No, I know exactly what you mean.”  
  
Edward’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Have you remembered something?”  
  
“No, not today,” Al said, eyes turning inward. “But I can feel it.” He smiled at his brother again. “How many good people we’ve said goodbye to up until now. We’ve sure been lucky.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
The light changed, and Al proceeded down to the next street and turned, rounding the corner onto Main Street.  
  
“Then to be able to say goodbye _is_ a good thing,” Al said contemplatively. “But… every time you are able to say hello again to someone you’ve once said goodbye to,” he continued,  
“That’s a joy beyond all the pain and all the sorrow. That must be what it means to be happy in a life where we’re all mortal, where everything must fade away someday. Every ‘hello’ that follows ‘goodbye.’”  
  
Alphonse glanced over at his brother, with his grey eyes, that dear face Edward had spent so many a dark day longing to see. So much of their mother in him, and some of their father, too, Ed could now admit. Both of them now gone, but still alive in the two of them, the last two Elrics.  
  
Edward smiled, and put his arm around Al’s shoulders, giving him a squeeze. “I think you just might be right, Al,” he said, and his brother smiled back at him before turning to face the road. “I think you just might be right.”  
  
And so they followed the road toward Central Station, and the new hellos to old friends that awaited them at the other end of the line.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is after the quote by Seneca in the summary.


End file.
